


Not Irredeemably Dark

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: F/M, Jail!sex, Porn Battle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-03
Updated: 2008-08-03
Packaged: 2017-10-06 23:12:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/58777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She gets one line back in answer: <em>come soon, or don't come at all</em>."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Irredeemably Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Porn Battle VI, to the prompt 'jail'.

He has written her letters; nine so far - one for every week he's been inside. At first they said almost nothing and she thought he was writing them because he wanted something to do, a reason not to have to waste the paper. Letters are very different from speeches, and that is something she had understood the day she said goodbye to him (three days before, secret always, and his mouth so bitter and desperate crushed against hers, biting at her lip) and she had asked _if_ he would write to her, not expecting that he would. He had hesitated and only nodded after a second. She couldn't decide, afterwards, if that had constituted a promise or not, so she had been surprised when the first letter did come, and then strangely downcast, full-up to overflowing with longing for him, when she had finished reading it.

At first they said almost nothing, and then things crept in. Mostly they come out when he talks about the kids and though he always used to ration the snippets of their lives he would give to her, now she has two letters she can never show anyone which are filled with almost nothing else. The second one like that made her cry and she shot back a reply, promising him things which aren't hers to give him, asking to see him out of desperation to say _something_ that might matter. She gets one line back in answer:

_Come soon, or don't come at all._

There is a table, two chairs. A small amount of privacy because the guard in the room is standing inside the doorway with his back turned to them. She looks at him and Toby murmurs, "I'm not considered a risk," with sarcasm heavy in his voice. She turns her eyes to him then, wondering what she's forgotten in the two months she hasn't seen him. It isn't a long time, but that's not how it has felt, every day. His skin seems paler, his eyes darker. There is, she's sure, more white in his beard and hair and his face is both harder and more desolate - all the lines in his face making up an evocation of the sadness she never saw there before.

"Toby."

He blinks, and his expression softens, a little. "Hey."

His hands are folded together on the table. When hers join them he holds on, so tight, and won't meet her eyes and strokes his thumb over the bone at the inside of her wrist, as he once did in their bed.

She doesn't know what makes her do it, except that the table is a narrow one and if she leans right forward she could almost kiss him and all her sense are full up with him; she can taste his skin on her tongue - the end of a memory, salt and the air of a summer evening, remembering how his cock tasted in her mouth. She has been slipping her shoes on and off her foot since he sat down, the toe of one on the heel of the other; a nervous tic. If she leans forward, if she just --

The side of her foot brushes against his ankle, strokes underneath his pants leg, and he looks up, sharply, with an urgent expression in his eyes. He swallows - she can see the swallow - then he nods.

It's a difficult angle and her muscles strain against it - something pulls and she winces - but she eases her foot up the inside of his leg, her instep against his calf; the back of her foot stroking against the ball of his knee, then back and forth against his thigh, allowing him to part his legs wider, holding on tight to his hand and hearing her own heart beating loudly in her ears, full of blood and terror, and want. The fabric of the prison uniform is on the thin side and she can almost pretend it isn't there if she concentrates on the heat, on the shape of him. She curls her foot around the curve of his thigh and rests there, letting her muscles adapt. She smiles and looks up at him. She knows he's hard already from the change in his breathing and the fever-bright gleam in his eyes - ready as he always is for this, but differently; with a coarse hunger in his face she has never seen before. He moans her name, under his breath, in the white spaces between the words they have been making up for the benefit of the guard. His knuckles are white. He is begging, and hating that he has to, hating himself and - for these few seconds - hating her, for offering him a single taste of something he cannot finish. His whole body is thrumming with need; his face is black with it, nothing gentle there anymore.

"Ellie, _please_ \-- "

She presses her foot into the crook of his thigh, now wide open and rides out the little tremor that shakes through him. She strokes as best she can, rubbing her ankle into the tender parts, reaching for his hipbone with her toes, slowly shifting her heel round until she knows she is up against his balls, applying pressure there, pushing at him. She risks a look at his face (she has been staring, fixedly, at their hands still joined in the centre of the table because she can't stand to see him look the way he does now) - his eyes are half-closed, his head is angled down and to the side, as though someone is giving him a backrub, not a footjob. Ellie strokes her thumb over his knuckles, still white; bends her head forward and kisses his fingers. He disentangles his hand, strokes her hair - down across her head and down to her shoulder, then behind her ear. He tries to smile and for a moment he looks like he used to, when he used, every now and then, to tell her that he loved her. The guard calls over his shoulder to say that they should be finishing up: they have five minutes left. Toby brushes his fingers across her mouth. They shake a little. She nods. _Go ..._

It is not like anything she has done before: slipping the arch of her foot over his erection, rubbing first up and then back down, wanting to feel him and not being able to and knowing that it wouldn't be the same if she could; an odd kind of intimacy gained over distance, watching his hands curl into fists on the table top and slipping her own right hand down between her legs, unzipping her jeans as quietly as shaky fingers and a stupid angle will allow and slipping one finger inside her cunt, knuckles sticking to the wetness of her panties, hardly any friction, her clitoris hard and tender and desperate. She rubs the side of her foot hard and fast along his cock, a diagonal that cuts just under head, and feels him shudder and still. She strokes him in gentle passes, coaxing out the end of the his orgasm, watching his breathing swell and settle. He is looking at her when she comes, meeting her eyes willingly for the first time since they started this, with a flush across his cheekbones and his eyes full black. She zips back up without wiping off her fingers, and puts her hand back into his. He grins then, like he can't help it, like he's proud of her and like he has no idea how to react to someone who would go to such lengths just to make him come. He kisses her fingers this time, and she feels a little swipe of his tongue across them, collecting memories to make the empty time go faster.

Then, the guard's voice, sounding like a guy who hates his job:

"Okay, time's up. I'm sorry, ma'am."

Toby's face is blank, but for his eyes. She reads gratitude, and self-loathing, and an injunction to silence, and love. She leans across the table and puts one hand - the one which is still sticky from her cunt and his tongue - on his shoulder, and kisses him.

"Write to me. Soon."

"I will," he says, and she thinks his voice sounds softer, no longer irredeemably dark. "I promise."


End file.
